So you’ve built an APEX application to solve a problem for one client, or one department, or just yourself – and you think it might be useful for others as well. How do you make that application available for other users, departments, or companies to reuse, while ensuring each sees only their own data and cannot mess around with others’ data?

Architecting a Multi-Tenant Application

To make your application multi-tenant you have a few options.

Option #1. Copy the application to another workspace/schema, another Pluggable Database (in Oracle 12c+) or another database server entirely.

Option #2. Modify your data model to allow completely independant sets of data to co-exist in the same physical tables (e.g. a security_group_id column that allows the database to discriminate data for each tenant).

The desirable properties of a multi-tenant system are as follows:

a. Tenant isolation – no tenant sees data for another tenant; no tenant can affect the app’s behaviour for another tenant; protect against “noisy neighbours” (i.e. those which impact system capacity and performance).

b. Administration – ability to backup/recover all data for a single tenant; ability to give a degree of control to each tenant (self service).

c. Maintainability – simplicity of deploying enhancements and bug fixes for all tenants, or for one tenant at a time (e.g. rolling upgrades).

d. Scalability – ability to easily add more tenants, ability to add more capacity for more tenants.

Some of these properties are more easily and effectively achieved with option #1 (separate servers or schemas for each tenant), such as Isolation and Administration. Other properties are more easily and effectively achieved with option #2 (discriminator column) such as Maintainability and Scalability. This is a gross generalisation of course; there are many solutions to this design problem each with many pros and cons.

Some inspiration may be gained from examining how Oracle Application Express achieves this goal: multi-tenant has been baked into the product, via its concept of Workspaces. Each tenant can be given their own workspace in APEX and are able to build and deploy applications in isolation from other workspaces. Internally, APEX maintains a unique security_group_id for each workspace. This works very well – a single Oracle database instance can serve thousands or tens of thousands of workspaces.

It should be noted that a benefit of pursuing Option #2 is that it does not necessarily preclude using Option #1 as well, should the need arise later on – for example, to provide more capacity or better performance in the presence of more demanding tenants. For this reason, plus the fact that it’s much easier to maintain and enhance an application for all users at once if they’re colocated, I prefer Option #2.Continue Reading →